A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "I'm a
billionaire."
You say "Prove it."
He says "ok", and he points across the street at a bank.
"My money is in that bank there." (The bank is closed.)
You say "What does that prove?"
He says "Everyone knows banks have money in them"
You say "I know there is money in the bank, but why should I believe
that
it's YOUR money?"
"Because it's GREEN" he says.
"What else can you show me?"
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a penny. "See -- I'm a
billionaire."
You're still skeptical. 'What does that prove?', you ask.
"I'M A BILLIONAIRE" he states loudly (obviously annoyed that you
would question him). He reaches in another pocket and pulls out another
penny,
"Do you believe me now?"

The
number of intermediate and
transitional links between all living and extinct species, must have
been
inconceivably great.~
Charles Darwin

But
just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an
enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which
have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every
geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?
Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated
organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious
objection which can be urged against the theory. The
explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the
geological
record. ~
Charles Darwin

He who rejects these views on the nature of the geologic
record, will rightly
reject my whole theory. ~
Charles Darwin

Darwin
produced embarrassingly little concrete evidence to back
up some of his most important claims. This includes the change of one
species into another in succeeding geological strata, or the production
of new structures and taxonomic types by natural selection. ~
Ernst Mayr

One might
suppose that Darwin, like his modern
intellectual descendants, saw in the fossil record a confirmation of
his theory
-- the literal documentation of life's evolution from the Cambrian to
the
present day. In fact, the two chapters devoted to geology in The
Origin of
Species are anything but celebratory. On the contrary, they
constitute a
carefully worded apology in which Darwin argues that evolution by
natural
selection is correct despite an evident lack of
support from fossils.
~ Andrew
Knoll

Darwin invoked his standard argument to resolve
this uncomfortable problem: the fossil record is so imperfect that we
do not have evidence for most events of life's history. But
even Darwin acknowledged that his favorite ploy was wearing a
bit thin in this case. His argument could easily account for
a missing stage in a single linage, but could the agencies of
imperfection really obliterate absolutely all evidence for positively
every creature during most of life's history? Darwin admitted: "The
case as present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a
valid argument against the views here entertained." (1859, p.308)

Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian
record, all discovered in the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar
character of this evidence has not matched Darwin's prediction of a
continuous rise in complexity toward Cambrian life, and the problem of
the Cambrian explosion has remained as stubborn as ever -- if not more
so, since
our confusion now rests on knowledge, rather than ignorance
about the nature of Precambrian life.
~ Stephen
Jay Gould

Since Darwin a tremendous
expansion of pale ontological knowledge
has taken place, and we know much more about the fossil record than was
known in
his time, but the basic situation is not much different. We
actually may have
fewer examples of smooth transition than we had in Darwin's time
because some of
the old examples have turned out to be invalid when studied in more
detail. To
be sure, some new intermediate or transitional forms have been found,
particularly among land vertebrates. But if Darwin were
writing today, he would
probably still have to cite a disturbing lack of missing links
or transitional
forms between the major groups of organisms.~ David Raup

Darwin's prediction of
rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is
refuted.
The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical
conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in
the
fossil record. ~ Niles
Eldredge

There
seems to have been almost
no change in any part we can compare between the living organism and
its
fossilized progenitors of the remote geological past. Living
fossils embody the
theme of evolutionary stability to an extreme degree...We
have not completely
solved the riddle of living fossils. ~ Niles Eldredge

When we descend to details, we
can prove that no one species has changed (i.e. we cannot
prove that a single
species has changed): nor can we prove that the supposed
changes are beneficial,
which is the groundwork of the theory. ~
Charles Darwin

As
Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of
the modern synthetic theory of evolution, pointed out in his
Systematics and the
Origin of Species (1942) Darwin never really did discuss the origin of
species
in his The Origin of Species. ~ Niles
Eldredge

It is now
approximately half a century since the neo-Darwinian synthesis was
formulated. A great deal of research has been carried on
within the
paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are limited to the
interpretation of the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive
change in
coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the
questions
which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first
place. ~
Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders

There is no doubt that natural
selection is a mechanism, that it works. It has been repeatedly
demonstrated by
experiment. There is no doubt at all that it works. But the question of
whether
it produces new species is quite another matter. No one has
ever produced a
species by mechanisms of natural selection.
~ Colin Patterson

The lynx feeds on hares and is
a fierce predator; both high and low figures apply to both populations,
the hunter and the hunted. The struggle is unremitting, as the
statistics prove. The evolutionary effect is nonexistent.
Morphologically and physiologically, both hare and lynx remain
unchanged. ~ Pierre Grasse

What is the use of their
unceasing mutations, if
they do not change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely
hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right,
a swing
to the left, but no final evolutionary effect. ~ Pierre Grasse

Anatomy may fluctuate over
time, but the last
remnants of a species usually look pretty much like the first
representatives. ~ Stephen
Jay Gould

All
paleontologists know that the
fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate
forms;
transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.
~ Stephen Jay Gould

The
extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as
the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our
textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the
rest
is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of
fossils. ~ Stephen
Jay Gould
see also: The Dotted Lines

Fossils may tell us many
things, but one thing
they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of
anything else. ~ Colin
Patterson

The intervals
of time that separate fossils are
so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible
connection
through ancestry and descent. ~ Henry Gee

The Origin of
Species converted the majority of its readers to a belief in Darwinian
evolution. We must now ask whether this was an unadulterated benefit to
biology and to mankind... I do not contest the fact that the advent of
the evolutionary idea, due mainly to the Origin, very greatly
stimulated biological research. But it appears to me that owing
precisely to the nature of the stimulus, a great deal of this work was
directed into unprofitable channels or devoted to the pursuit of
will-o’- the-wisps. I am not the only biologist of this opinion.
Darwin’s conviction that evolution is the result of natural selection,
acting on small fortuitous variations, says Guyenot, was to delay the
progress of investigations on evolution by half a century. Really
fruitful researches on heredity did not begin until the rediscovery in
1900 of the fundamental work of Mendel, published in 1865 and owing
nothing to the work of Darwin.
~ W.R.
Thompson

Biochemists and biologists who
adhere blindly to the
Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with
their
theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction
... This
intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations
and
experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover,
creates
false problems. ... Assuming that the Darwinian hypothesis is correct,
they
interpret fossil data according to it; it is only logical that they
should
confirm it: the premises imply the conclusions. The error in
method is
obvious. ~ Pierre Grasse

The
opposite truth has been affirmed by innumerable cases of measurable
evolution at this minimal scale-but, to be visible at all over so short
a span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the
basis for major transformations in geological time. Hence, the “paradox
of the visibly irrelevant”-or,
if you can see it at all, it’s too fast to matter in the long
run. ~ Stephen
Jay Gould

The central
question of the Chicago conference
was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be
extrapolated to
explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence
to the
positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given
as a
clear No.
~ Roger Lewin

Molecular
biology has shown that even the
simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are
exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are
incredibly
small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a
veritable
micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed
pieces
of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred
thousand
million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and
absolutely
without parallel in the nonliving world. ~ Michael Denton

No
matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of
evolution. ~ Pierre Grasse

On experimental grounds, I have shown
that there
are no known random mutations that have added any genetic information
to the
organism. I go through a list of the best examples of
mutations offered by
evolutionists and show that each of them loses genetic information
rather than
gains it. One of the examples that where information is lost is the one
often
trotted out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the
public of
the truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance
to
antibiotics. ~ Lee SpetnerSee
also: virus

Thanks to its enormous
population size, rate of reproduction, and our knowledge of the
genetics, the
single best test case of Darwin's theory is the history of malaria.
Much of
this book will center on this disease. Many parasitic diseases afflict
humanity,
but historically the greatest bane has been malaria, and it is among
the most
thoroughly studied. For ten thousand years the mosquito-borne parasite
has
wreaked illness and death over vast expanses of the globe. Until a
century ago
humanity was ignorant of the cause of malarial fever, so no conscious
defense
was possible. The only way to lessen the intense, unyielding selective
pressure
from the parasite was through the power of random mutation. Hundreds of
different mutations that confer a measure of resistance to malaria
cropped up in
the human genome and spread through our population by natural
selection. These
mutations have been touted by Darwinists as among the best, clearest
examples of
the abilities of Darwinian evolution.

And so they are. But, as
we'll see, now that the molecular changes underlying malaria
resistance have
been laid bare, they tell a much different tale than Darwinists
expected --
a tale that highlights the incoherent flailing involved in a blind
search.
Malaria offers some of the best examples of Darwinian evolution, but
that
evidence points both to what it can, and more important what it cannot,
do.
Similarly, changes in the human genome, in
response to malaria, also
point to the radical limits of the efficacy of random mutation.

Because it has been
studied so extensively, and because of the astronomical number of
organisms
involved, the evolutionary struggle between humans and our ancient
nemesis
malaria is the best, most reliable basis we have for forming judgments
about the
power of random mutation and natural selection. Few other sources of
information
even come close. And as we'll see, the few that do tell similar
tales. ~
Michael Behe

Real arms races
are run by highly intelligent,
bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny
weapons on
modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of
nature's
trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and
confusion
of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by
chewing
gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy,
including
the kitchen sink -- there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its
usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the
enemy can be
stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own
radio towers
and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does
not lead to
progress -- it leads back to the Stone Age. ~
Michael Behe

It
is the great irony of
modern evolutionary genetics that the spirit of explanation has moved
more and
more towards optimal adaptation, while the technical developments of
population
genetics of the past 30 years have been increasingly to show the
efficacy of non
adaptive forces in evolution. ~ Richard Lewontin

By
irreducibly complex I mean
a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts
that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the
parts
causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly
complex
system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving
the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive
modification of a precursor, system, because any precursors to an
irreducibly complex
system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. ~
Michael Behe

In
the abstract, it might be
tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires
multiple
simultaneous mutations -- that evolution might be far chancier than we
thought,
but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be
refuted... Luck is
metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke
causes. ~ Michael
Behe

Pennock
is guilty of his own form of magic, however. This third form of magic
is the
view that something can be gotten for nothing. This form of magic can
be nuanced.
The "nothing" here need not be an absolute nothing. And the
transformation of nothing into something may involve minor expenditures
of
effort. For instance, the magician may need to utter "abracadabra" or
"hocus-pocus." Likewise the Darwinian just-so stories that attempt to
account
for complex, information-rich biological structures are incantations
that give
the illusion of solving a problem but in fact merely cloak
ignorance.

Darwinists,
for instance, explain the human eye as having evolved from a light
sensitive
spot that successively became more complicated as increasing visual
acuity
conferred increased reproductive capacity on an organism. In such a
just-so
story, all the historical and biological detail in the eye's
construction are
lost. How did a spot become innervated and thereby light-sensitive? How
exactly
did a lens form within a pinhole camera? With respect to embryology,
what developmental
changes are required to go from a light-sensitive sheet to a
light-sensitive
cup? None of these questions receives an answer in purely Darwinian
terms. Darwinian
just-so stories are no more enlightening than Rudyard Kipling's
original just-so
stories about how the elephant got its trunk or the giraffe its neck.
Such
stories are entertaining, but they hardly engender profound
insight.
~
William Dembski

The
information necessary to specify the design
of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on
the planet, a number
according to G. G. Simpson of approximately one thousand million,
could be held
in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the
information in
every book ever written. ~ Michael Denton

They conceived the evidence that would carry the
vital intellectual argument, but at its core lay flawed science,
dubious
methodology and wishful thinking. Clustered around the
peppered moth is a swarm
of human ambition, and self-delusions shared among some of
the most renowned
evolutionary biologists of our era. ~ Judith HooperSee
also: 12

The
most erroneous stories are those we think we
know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. Ask
anyone to name the
most familiar of all evolutionary series and you will almost surely
receive, as
an answer: horses, of course...Modern horses are not only depleted
relative to
horses of the past; on a larger scale, all major lineages of the
Perissodactyla
(the larger mammalian group that includes horses) are
pitiful remnants of former
copious success. Modern horses, in other words, are failures
within a failure --
about the worst possible exemplars of evolutionary progress, whatever
such a
term might mean. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Genomes are
littered with nonfunctional
pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing,
while their
functional cousins (the word doesn't even need scare quotes) get on
with their
business in a different part of the genome. And there’s lots more DNA
that
doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by
duplication,
but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies
of junk,
“tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic
detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once
again,
creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the
Creator should
bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem
repeat
DNA. ~ Richard
Dawkins

There were
long stretches of DNA in between genes
that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as
"junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was
required for anyone
to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance. ~ Francis CollinsSee also: 12

It was a failing of Haeckel as
a would-be scientist
that his hand as an artist altered what he saw with what
should have been
the eye of a more accurate beholder. He was
more than once, often
justifiably, accused of scientific falsification, by
Wilhelm His and by
many others. For only two examples, in "Anthropogenie" he drew the
developing brain of a fish as curved, because that of
reptiles, birds,
and mammals is bent. But the vesicles of a fish brain always
form in a
straight line. He drew the embryonic membranes of
man as including a
small sac-like allantois, an embryonic organ characteristic of
and larger in
reptiles, birds, and some nonhuman mammals. The human embryo
has no
sac-like allantois at all. Only its narrow solid stock
remains to
conduct the umbilical blood vessels between embryo and
placenta. Examples
could be multiplied significantly. ~ Jane OppenheimerSee also: 1234

Beginning in
1980 with the dinosaur/asteroid
controversy, it has more recently become popular for geologists to
consider not
just local, but global catastrophes to account for the geologic
evidence they
see. One can be assured that for a community to have made such an
incredible
shift -- in spite of the strong association which exists between
catastrophism
and creationism -- there must be profound evidence for catastrophe
throughout the
geologic column. ~ Kurt
Wise

To
press the matter further, if there were a
basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward
life, its
existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could,
for
instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill
it with
any chemicals of a non- biological nature you please. Pump any gases
over it, or
through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that
takes your
fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those
2,000
enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save
the time
and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would
find nothing
at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and
other
simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement?
Well, if
it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and
would be
well known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be
trivial
compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon... In short
there is not a
shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began
in an
organic soup here on Earth. ~ Fred Hoyle

If
you wanted to produce carbon
and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis,
these are the
two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just
about
where these levels are actually found to be... A common
sense interpretation of
the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics,
as well as
with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth
speaking
about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me
so
overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond
question. ~ Fred
Hoyle

In
fact the a priori reasoning is so
entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won’t fit in,
why so much the
worse for the facts is my feeling. ~ Erasmus Darwin

Complete objectivity in science
is an illusion.
Because so much of one’s analysis depends upon metaphysical
assumptions, it
should be acknowledged by this writer, and by all readers, that
the answer one
gives to a question depends to a great extent on the metaphysical
position one
has previously adopted. ~ Dean
Overman

Darwinists believe that the mutation-selection
mechanism accomplishes wonders of creativity not because the wonders
can be demonstrated, but because they cannot think of a more plausible
explanation for the existence of wonders that does not involve an
unacceptable creator, i.e., a being or force outside the world of
nature. ~ Phillip Johnson

Truth be told,
evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes,
bacteria
evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but
beyond that
there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new
vaccines to
manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution
helped
guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in
crop plants
and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and
came
about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’.
Even
now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has
been of
little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost
certainly
come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all. ~ Jerry Coyne

It struck me that I had been
working
on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about
it.
That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long...so
for the
last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people
and groups
of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know
about evolution, any
one
thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology
staff at the Field
Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was
silence. I tried it on
the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of
Chicago,
a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was
silence for a
long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing -- it
ought not
to be taught in high school'. ~ Colin
Patterson

In fact the a
priori reasoning is so
entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won’t fit in, why so much
the
worse for the facts is my feeling.~
Erasmus
Darwin